Affiliated Faculty
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Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and Assyriology, Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture
Laurel Bestock's research focuses on the material culture of the Nile Valley and on archaeological methodology and recording technology. She is particularly interested in kingship, monumentality, the contexts and audiences for art and architecture, and cultural interactions. She co-directs an excavation in the Sudan with Christian Knoblauch (Austrian Academy of Science).
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W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics, Professor of History
John Bodel studies ancient Roman social, economic, and cultural history and Latin literature, especially of the empire. Much of his research involves inscriptions, and he has special interests in Roman religion, slavery, funerals and burial customs, ancient writing systems, the editing of Latin epigraphic and literary texts, and Latin prose authors. Since 1995, he has directed the U.S.
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Christopher Chan and Michelle Ma Professor of the History of Art
Medieval architecture and archaeology; digital humanities
I am an archaeologist and architectural historian specializing in the study of medieval sites and their representation. I am currently Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, and Professor of Archaeology.
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Senior Lecturer, Classics
Ancient Indian intellectual traditions, especial grammatical traditions and philosophy/theology
David Buchta's primary area of specialization is Sanskrit poetry and theology of bhakti, particularly in the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition associated with Caitanya (1486-1533).
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Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology, Professor of Classics, Professor of Anthropology
After a brief stint in the late 1970s in the Department of Ancient History and Classical Archaeology at the University of Sheffield, John Cherry was appointed to a University Lectureship in Aegean Prehistory in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge (1980 - 1993), and as a Fellow and Tutor at Fitzwilliam College, where he
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Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
Tamara Chin works on comparative approaches to antiquity, with a focus on: Han dynasty and early Chinese texts; the Afro-Eurasian "Silk Road"; historical narrative and poetics; with broader interests in classical reception; and in economic, gender & sexuality, and race studies.
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Associate Professor of History & Classics
Mediterranean in late antiquity, early medieval Europe, long-distance social interconnectedness, empire, violence, trauma
Jonathan P. Conant's research focuses on the inter-regional integration of the Mediterranean and the transition from antiquity to the middle ages.
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John F. Nickoll Professor of History
history of medicine, science, knowledge practices
Hal Cook comes from the American Midwest, although he is now a British as well as US citizen, having devoted almost a decade to his work as Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.
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John Rowe Workman Assistant Professor of Classics
Ancient Greek and Roman literature, Roman Imperial cultures, Classical Reception, Literary Theory, Ecocriticism and Critical Materialisms
An alumna of Brown Classics and Literary Arts, Sasha-Mae's research primarily interrogates the politics and ethics of form with an eye to questions of the human, the animal, and other kinds of embodied difference (e.g. race and/or gender). She is currently at work on two book projects.
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Visiting Assistant Professor, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
Roman Archaeology, Environmental history
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Visiting Assistant Professor, Religious Studies, South Asian Studies, Contemplative Studies
Sanskrit texts and philology; South Asian Religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism; ritual studies; sensory studies; sound studies; yoga studies
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David Benedict Professor of Classics and Philosophy
Mary Louise Gill joined the Brown Philosophy and Classics Departments in 2001 after teaching at the University of Pittsburgh. She has held visiting appointments at Dartmouth, Stanford, UCLA, UC Davis, and Harvard.
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Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies
Yannis Hamilakis has studied at the University of Crete (BA History and Archaeology), and the University of Sheffield (MSc and PhD). He has taught at the University of Wales Lampeter (1996-2000) and the University of Southampton in the UK (2000-2016). He has been Wiener Lab Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies, Athens (1993-1994), Mary Seeger O'Boyle Fellow at Princeton Universi
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Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies
Jae Hee Han (Ph.D.
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Professor of Classics
Johanna Hanink earned her PhD in Classics from the University of Cambridge (Queens' College). Her work in classics focused on classical Athens, particularly the cultural life of the city's fourth century BCE. She is also interested in the intersections between modern politics and ideas about ancient Greece (and antiquity more generally).
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Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of History and Religion
Susan Ashbrook Harvey specializes in late antique and Byzantine Christianity, with Syriac studies as her particular focus. She has published widely on topics relating to asceticism, hagiography, women and gender, hymnography, homiletics, and piety in late antique Christianity.
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Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, French and Francophone Studies, and Hispanic Studies
Ancient Greek and Roman literature, epic/empire, women and gender, hagiography, Classical Reception, Literary Theory, Latin Poetry, Tragedy and Epic Poetry
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Dupee Family Professor of Social Science, Department of Anthropology
Royal courts, writing systems, emotions, ontology, concepts of materials, ancient imagery and representation, text-picture relations, lidar and settlement, epigraphy, decipherment
Stephen Houston's research interests include archaeology; kingship and court systems; body concepts in antiquity; writing systems; epigraphy and decipherment; architecture and urbanism; Classic Maya; South America; Europe. He is concluding excavations at the Classic Maya city of El Zotz, Guatemala, and has finished five seasons of work at the ruins of Piedras Negras, Guatemala.
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Associate Professor of Religious Studies and History
Medieval Islam, History of emotions
Nancy Khalek is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and History, and specializes in medieval Islam. She received her Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2006.
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Associate Professor of Classics
Stephen Kidd specializes in Greek literature of the classical period, especially comedy and philosophy. His first book Nonsense and Meaning in Ancient Greek Comedy (Cambridge, 2014) asks why comedy, unlike other genres, gives rise to the perception that some part of it is not meaningful (“just silly”, “just funny”) despite the fact that new meanings continue to be discovered year afte
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John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Classics and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature
Greek and Roman literature and philosophy
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Professor Emerita, Religious Studies and Judaic Studies
Jews in the late antique Mediterranean diaspora; ancient Christianity, religion and gender in the ancient Mediterranean
Ross S. Kraemer, Emerita Professor of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies, specializes in early Christianity and other religions of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, including early Judaism.
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John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities, Professor of Classics, Professor of Hispanic Studies
Andrew Laird came to Brown in 2016 from Warwick University in the UK, where he was Professor of Classical Literature. His research interests extend beyond ancient Greece and Rome to the European Renaissance and colonial Latin America, with a focus on the role of humanism in mediating native languages and legacies in sixteenth-century Mexico.
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Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society
Brian Lander studies the environmental history of ancient China, focusing on how the natural ecosystems of the Yellow and Yangzi river valleys were gradually replaced with farmland.
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Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture
East Asia
Jeffrey Moser’s research attends, broadly, to the conceptual and material processes whereby past things are made present, with particular attention to the ways in which these processes intersect in the artistic practices and scholarly techne of medieval China.
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Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Classics
Pura Nieto Hernández was born in Salamanca, Spain, where she attended the university as an undergraduate and graduate student. Both her degrees are in Classics (PhD 1990). She taught there between the years 1990-1994 before coming to Brown as a Visiting Assistant Professor for the academic year 1997-8.
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Professor of Classics, Professor of History
Greek ancient history (especially social and economic); Greek epigraphy and monumental culture; the reception of ancient Greece; war memorials and commemorative practices.
Graham Oliver undertook both his undergraduate studies in Classics (BA Literae Humaniores, 1989) and his doctoral studies (D. Phil Ancient History, 1995) at Oxford University. He moved to The University of Liverpool in 1994 where he taught until 2013 before coming to Brown as Professor of Classics.
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Samuel Ungerleider, Jr. Professor of Judaic Studies, Professor of Religious Studies
Saul M. Olyan is Samuel Ungerleider Jr. Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University.
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James Manning Professor of Anthropology, Director of Haffenreffer Museum
Robert Preucel received his doctorate from UCLA in 1988. He was a member of Jim Hill's Pajarito Archaeological Research Project and wrote his dissertation on seasonal agricultural circulation. He was the 6th Annual CAI Visiting Scholar at SIU Carbondale in 1989 and organized a conference on the Processual/Postprocessual debate.
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William A. Dyer, Jr. Assistant Professor of the Humanities & Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Jason Protass (Ph.D., Stanford) specializes in Chinese Buddhism of the Northern and Southern Song dynasties (960-1279). He writes about Buddhism and poetry, Chan history, and other topics.
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Professor of Classics and in the Program in Medieval Studies
Joseph Pucci is Professor of Classics and in the Program in Medieval Studies at Brown, where he teaches courses on classical, later and medieval Latin language and literature, literary selfhood in late antique and medieval literature, the western tradition, and reception studies.
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Visiting Assistant Professor, Religious Studies
South Asia
Srinivas began his musical training as a guitarist and composer. In 1998 he graduated from Brown University with a BA in South Asian Studies and completed his senior project entitled NaadaSat, a multi-instrumental ensemble piece that reflected his growing interest in South Asian philosophy and music.
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Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature
Ancient Greek and Latin literature; early modern Latin poetry; Classical reception studies
Jay Reed is a scholar of Ancient Greek and Roman literature and culture, and has worked especially on Hellenistic and Augustan poetry. He received his B.A. from Yale in 1987, and his A.M. and Ph.D. from Stanford in 1991 and 1993. He previously taught Classics at the Ohio State University, Cornell, and the University of Michigan.
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Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence, Professor of History
Amy G. Remensnyder joined the Brown faculty in 1993, where she is now Professor of History and Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence. She earned her A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard University, studied at Cambridge University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, and received her Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Berkeley.
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Assistant Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Classics
Candace Rice is an archaeologist whose research focuses on Mediterranean maritime trade and economic development during the Roman period. She is particularly interested in exploring what the archaeological record reveals about the ways in which connectivity changed the nature of the Roman economy through enhanced supra-regional integration and specialized local economic development.
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Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture
Art and Architecture of Ancient Rome; Art and Architecture of Ancient Mesoamerica; Archaeology; Religious Studies
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Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and Assyriology
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Director of the Program in Early Cultures, Associate Professor of Classics, Associate Professor of History
Architecture, urbanism, and space
Amy Russell is a Roman political and cultural historian, with a particular interest in architecture, urbanism, and space. She is currently working on a monograph on the building activity of the imperial Senate, part of a larger project on the contributions of multiple social groups to imperial imagery and ideology.
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Associate Professor of Egyptology and Assyriology
Matthew Rutz works in the field of Assyriology, the interdisciplinary study of texts written in the cuneiform ("wedge-shaped") writing system from ancient Mesopotamia, traditionally the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (present-day Iraq, Syria, and Turkey).
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Professor of History, Professor of Classics
Kenneth Sacks received his Ph.D. from California, Berkeley in Ancient History. He taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1976-1995, at which time he came to Brown as Professor of History and Dean of the College. He has been full time in the history department since 1998.
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Professor of Judaic Studies and Religious Studies
Professor Michael L. Satlow received his Ph.D. in "Ancient Judaism" from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1993. His most recent book is How the Bible Became Holy. He is on the board of Henoch and is a co-editor of the Brown Judaic Studies series. He has held ACLS and Guggenheim Fellowships.
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Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies
Religious and intellectual history of East Asia
Janine Sawada specializes in the religious and intellectual history of early modern Japan. She has recently completed a study of the religious movement dedicated to Mt. Fuji (later called Fujikō) that emerged in Japan during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
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Associate Professor of Anthropology, Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World
Andrew Scherer is an anthropological archaeologist and biological anthropologist with a geographic focus in Mesoamerica (Maya). He co-directs an interdisciplinary archaeological research project that is exploring Classic Maya polities along the Usumacinta River in Mexico.
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Professor of the History of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity, Wilbour Professor of Egyptology and Assyriology
John Steele is a historian of the exact sciences in antiquity. He specializes in the history of astronomy, with a particular focus on Babylonian astronomy.
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Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Anthropology
Peter van Dommelen is a Mediterranean archaeologist, whose research and teaching revolve around the rural Mediterranean past and present. The regional focus of his work lies in the western Mediterranean, where he carries out long-term fieldwork on the island of Sardinia.
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Associate Professor of Anthropology
Art and Architecture of Ancient Rome; Art and Architecture of Ancient Mesoamerica; Archaeology; Religious Studies
Parker VanValkenburgh's research and publications employ archaeological methods to address anthropological research questions, with a particular focus on the long-term impacts of colonialism and imperialism on Indigenous people and environments in Andean Peru.